A conversation with Robert Pease, VP of Marketing for MessageGate (www.messagegate.com).
Now, e-mail classification is not quite up there on the sex appeal meter as say Web 2.0, YouTube, or other aspects of daily tech life, but with the recent changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) in December of 2006, US-based companies have a much keener eye to the problems that are lurking in their e-mail archives.
Unless you are a very small organization, or are not using e-mail (and please let me know if you've found a way to sidestep e-mail, I'd love to hear your secret!), it is extremely unlikely that you can scale e-mail classification by relying on individual users or even a SWAT team of technical or legal personnel to do upfront, manual classification of e-mail into your archiving system.
The good news though, is that by running through scenarios up front, you can lop off anywhere between 60-80% of the e-discovery pain you're likely to incur through "traditional" discovery firedrills, which are not only painful due to the number of systems and queries that have to be pieced together for an "ad hoc" solution, but may simply take too long for you to adequately comply with the FRCP rules, and thus force you to settle out of court or incur fines or other penalties.
Less is more, as you'll hear in this interview, and if you've been overwhelmed by the issues of mass quantities of e-mail in your organization, listen up, and perhaps a few rays of light can pierce your cloudy discovery nightmares, and *also* set you up to build a stable information architecture that can be used for more enlightened and revenue driving business issues in your organization.
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